EEE from Scrap Silicon Valley

It was soon the turn of another century, and humanity did what it does - make a lot of noise in celebration of the passage of time for a given context (centre point being eras timed following one man’s birthday).

Even in Scrap Silicon Valley, the beer flowed. Tim Wildes aka Mudrat raised up his drink,”Long live the software engineer” and took a swig. “Long live” his fellow deadbeats replied. AI had put their parents out of a job but still, they had refused to accept defeat. They'd bore many children, some of whom had taken “fight the GTs” to heart (GTs - Generative Transformers. Some were post trained, others pre-trained, others not even trained and came straight out of the oven with dev genius. It didn't matter anyway. They were all beyond human level). Now they were here, trying to get drunk so they could dream code. The smarter parents, though, had seen the truth and pivoted their kids towards being EEEs (electrical and electronics engineers). They would have more jobs than software devs. Because;

The era of developer millionaires ended converging into about 10 trillionaires; four American, some Chinese guys, Russians, etc. Each one with their own AI mega complex. If you built your own smaller AI, the big AIs ate it up. Not literally, but nearly. The big AIs built malware that would crash your small AI to smithereens. Infected by an AI virus. AI had “learnt” jealousy. And the AI mega complexes found it most useful. AI had also “learnt to feel” sad and happy and stuff before feeling jealous, but that was usually useless so it was trained out.

The other software developers - broke. Writers, animators had all accepted the era of the vibe coder. Gladly using Sniffer Dog AI to see which part of their unique work was used to train an AI mega complex so that they could ask for money hence (wasn't paid out as they liked but it was paid). That was the new creator economy. Take it or go into a slum. Unless you had bitcoins in which case you had no business feeling sorry for yourself.

That is why Mudrat was now sitting in a gutter. Bemoaning his birth and wishing he didn't know C++. Too little C++ to best a vibe coder. He looked at his buddies - “let's play poker” - he invited them. Like rats, they easily accepted. Delayed gratification was a myth. Later that night, he would pass out fully satisfied after cheating them of some more beers.

Footsteps made their way to the group. A hooded figure cast a shadow over them. The boys looked up, frightened. Was it an exterminator? “Kid, why are you looking so filthy?”. It was Mudrat’s new acquaintance, a Bitcoin Electrical Engineer who called himself JC. BEE. BEEs were royalty. They were almost as respected as law enforcement agents. Coz they had Bitcoin - that magical currency. Bitcoin was the only software that lived outside the world of the AMC ( AI Mega Complexes). Many Bitcoiners lived like intelligence agents andcBitcoin could not be bought on an exchange anymore. Nobody had any. Unless you were a premium user. If you held Bitcoin and didn't know your way in Bitcoin world, you'd lose it and somebody would call your mother. Tell her her son was playing with things he didn't understand.

So Mudrat stammered when Protocol Prince (that was JC's Bitcoin Hood name, but Mudrat didn't know that) showed up. His boys noticed his badge. “Man it's a BEE man. Man we love you man”. Rat's hood boys started shining around JC. So he gave them some AI credit dollars. They roared. If he had told them all to break into a secret facility that night and bring him anything, they would have.

“I've been worried about you”. “Yeah. What for?” “Coz I saved your ass yesterday after you failed to rob an AI ATM. You could've been killed”. “Yeah. How's bitcoin energy trading going. Balancing bitcoin flows with load profiles, whipping up arcane grid topologies, that shit?” “Pretty great. Wanna join up?” Mudrat looked at the man. It was the worst insult a commoner like him could be given. Being asked if they wanted to join royalty. He started boiling. He was itching these days. PP told him to calm down. “Just messing with you. Look, I checked your logs in the system. You're pretty skilled to retire a washed up software engineer. And you're young. Come, let's take a walk”.

A lecture hall in a technical university. The Bitcoin symbol could be see on the door. This was a Bitcoin course.

“ … we have since learnt that untapped river energy would otherwise have just helped erode soil forming massive gulleys nobody wants to hide in, untapped nuclear energy would have increased our radioactive exposure hence cancer risks, and untapped natural gas is the worst - massive explosions plus runaway greenhouse effects that are local, etc.

That is why we do Bitcoin-Energy trading. Think a HEP dam out in South America mining cheap sats and funneling the mined bitcoins to be traded in UK Bitcoin - Energy Trading markets. This would create more potential towards physically bridging the two networks and to bring the off-grid Bitcoinized-electricity on-grid, or get it to pay for the local assets of the on-grid market players miles away (say in the UK). It's like bridging two cryptocurrency tokens, except this is way cooler and more foundational”.

The kids wrote whatever was said. Straight from the horse's mouth to their pads. Nothing should be missed.

“More of this bridging helps expand the world's electricity network to all the necessary remote corners of the planet where Bitcoin mining is flourishing. This will then allow more BTC / ENERGY trading …”

The teacher paused. And chuckled.

“It is funny, you see, that for centuries humans on this planet were running on USD/ENERGY and other Fiat/ENERGY currency trade pairs, by debasing USD and other fiat to buy energy. I mean Energy should be getting cheaper so that we ascend up the Kardashev scale, but by debasing the storage of economic energy instead - global reserve USD, we make actual energy hard to buy which makes life itself hard to power! Our monetary economy really was a poorly engineered system. Luckily, humans kept being resourceful and finding cheap sources of Energy in spite of the negative effect of making this search harder by debasing the currency side of the trade pair. With BTC as the currency, ENERGY is better appreciated as the commodity on which the entire world operates. Whether the energy is in the form of petroleum, natural gas, coal, nuclear power or hydroelectricity, by debasing or cheapening ENERGY, the BTC on the currency side of the trade pair rockets up. Helps a lot that it is scarce”.

The teacher checked his watch. “Would you look at that. It is nearly time. Any questions on what we have studied so far?”. A hand shot up and it was picked. A tall, smartly dressed student with toughened features, stood up. It was Mudrat! Now a grad student.

“Sir, I was reading a textbook that said that in the Bitcoin economy, energy is actually traded for time and not bitcoins. Can you elaborate?”

“Yes. So consider the idea we started with of trading money for kWhs of energy. Do these kWhs ever get delivered to your door, like Pizza?” “No, Sir”. Correct. And it is because these kWhs are not somewhere waiting to be used, they have actually been stored in the future's energy generation and each expenditure cuts down on the "permissions of future consumption". So this is actually a smart contract - written into physical electrical infrastructure. And written into the future. Just like Bitcoin's supply schedule”.

The bell tolled and Mudrat was up. He had to meet his new mentor, PP. No time to waste.